The question “Why wasn’t Auschwitz bombed?” is not only historical. It is also a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust. Moreover, it is a question that has been posed to a series of presidents of the United States.

In their first meeting in 1979, President Jimmy Carter handed Elie Wiesel—a noted author and survivor of Auschwitz who was then chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust—a copy of the soon-to-be-released aerial photographs of the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II), taken by American intelligence forces during World War II. Wiesel was imprisoned in Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III), the slave-labour camp of Auschwitz, when in August 1944 Allied planes bombed the IG Farben plant there. Of that event he wrote, “We were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life.”

Two months after his initial meeting with Carter, in an address at the first National Days of Remembrance ceremony at the Capitol rotunda on April 24, 1979, Wiesel responded to his gift by saying, “The evidence is before us: The world knew and kept silent. The documents that you, Mr. President, handed to the chairman of your Commission on the Holocaust, testify to that effect.” Wiesel was to repeat that accusation to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. The failure to bomb Auschwitz during World War II also became part of the debate in 1999 over the Allied bombing of Kosovo.

First to the historical issues: The question of bombing Auschwitz first arose in the summer of 1944, more than two years after the gassing of Jews had begun and at a time when more than 90 percent of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were already dead. It could not have arisen earlier because not enough was known specifically about Auschwitz, and the camps were outside the range of Allied bombers. By June 1944 information concerning the camps and their function was available—or could have been made available—to those undertaking the mission. German air defenses were weakened, and the accuracy of Allied bombing was increasing. All that was required was the political will to order the bombing.

Before the summer of 1944, Auschwitz was not the most lethal of the six Nazi extermination camps. The Nazis had killed more Jews at Treblinka, where between 750,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in the 17 months of its operation, and at Belzec, where 600,000 were killed in less than 10 months. In 1943 the Nazis closed both camps. Their mission, the destruction of Polish Jewry, had been completed. But during the summer of 1944 Auschwitz overtook the other death camps not only in the number of Jews killed but in the pace of destruction. The condition of the Jews was desperate.

In March 1944 Germany invaded Hungary. In April the Nazis confined the Hungarian Jews to ghettos. Between May 15 and July 9, the Nazis deported some 438,000 Jews on 147 trains from Hungary to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. To accommodate the newly arriving Hungarian Jews, the Nazis built a railroad spur directly into Auschwitz-Birkenau. Because the Nazis sent four of five arriving Jews directly to their death, the extermination camp was strained beyond capacity. The gas chambers were operating around the clock, and the crematoria were so overtaxed that bodies were burned in open fields with body fat fueling the flames. Any interruption in the killing process might have saved thousands of lives.

Yet bombing a concentration camp filled with innocent, unjustly imprisoned civilians also posed a moral dilemma for the Allies. To be willing to sacrifice innocent civilians, one would have had to perceive accurately conditions in the camp and to presume that interrupting the killing process would be worth the loss of life in Allied bombings. In short, one would have had to know that those in the camps were about to die. Such information was not available until the spring of 1944.

On April 10, 1944, two men escaped from Auschwitz: Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. They made contact with Slovak resistance forces and produced a substantive report on the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In great detail, they documented the killing process. Their report, replete with maps and other specific details, was forwarded to Western intelligence officials along with an urgent request to bomb the camps. Part of the report, forwarded to the U.S. government’s War Refugee Board by Roswell McClelland, the board’s representative in Switzerland, arrived in Washington on July 8 and July 16, 1944. While the complete report, together with maps, did not arrive in the United States until October, U.S. officials could have received the complete report earlier if they had taken a more urgent interest in it.

The Vrba-Wetzler report provided a clear picture of life and death at Auschwitz. As a result, Jewish leaders in Slovakia, some American Jewish organizations, and the War Refugee Board all urged the Allies to intervene. However, the request was far from unanimous. Jewish leadership was divided. As a general rule, the established Jewish leadership was reluctant to press for organized military action directed specifically to save the Jews. They feared being too overt and encouraging the perception that World War II was a “Jewish war.” Zionists, recent immigrants, and Orthodox Jews were more willing to press for specific efforts to save the Jews. Their voices, however, were more marginal than those of the established Jewish leadership, and their attempts were even less effective.

It would be a mistake to assume that anti-Semitism or indifference to the plight of the Jews—while present—was the primary cause of the refusal to support bombing. The issue is more complex. On June 11, 1944, the Jewish Agency executive committee meeting in Jerusalem refused to call for the bombing of Auschwitz. Jewish leadership in Palestine was clearly neither anti-Semitic nor indifferent to the situation of their brethren. David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the executive committee, said, “We do not know the truth concerning the entire situation in Poland and it seems that we will be unable to propose anything concerning this matter.” Ben-Gurion and his colleagues were concerned that bombing the camps could kill many Jews—or even one Jew. Although no specific documentation reversing the decision of June 11 has been found, officials of the Jewish Agency were forcefully calling for the bombing by July.

What happened between the June 11 refusal to call for bombing and the subsequent action? After the Vrba-Wetzler report arrived in Palestine, the Jewish Agency executive committee had come to understand what was happening in Poland and was much more willing to risk Jewish lives in the camp rather than to permit the gassing to proceed unimpeded.

Jewish Agency officials appealed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who told his foreign secretary Anthony Eden on July 7, “Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.” Yet the British never carried through with the bombing.

Requests were also made to American officials to bomb Auschwitz. Similarly they were asked to come to the aid of the Poles in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 by bombing the city. Yet the Americans denied the requests to bomb Auschwitz, citing several reasons: military resources could not be diverted from the war effort (as they were to support the non-Jewish Poles); bombing Auschwitz might prove ineffective; and bombing might provoke even more vindictive German action. On the other hand, the Americans did not claim that Auschwitz was outside the range of the most effective American bombers.

In fact, as early as May 1944 the U.S. Army Air Forces had the capability to strike Auschwitz at will. The rail lines from Hungary were also well within range, though for rail-line bombing to be effective it had to be sustained. On July 7, 1944, American bombers flew over the rail lines to Auschwitz. On August 20, 127 B-17s, with an escort of 100 P-51 fighter craft, dropped 1,336 500-pound bombs on the IG Farben synthetic-oil factory that was less than 5 miles (8 km) east of Birkenau. German oil reserves were a priority American target, and the Farben plant ranked high on the target list. The death camp remained untouched. It should be noted that military conditions imposed some restrictions on any effort to bomb Auschwitz. For the bombing to be feasible, it had to be undertaken by day in good weather and between July and October 1944.

In August, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy wrote to Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress, noting that the War Refugee Board had asked if it was possible to bomb Auschwitz. McCloy responded:

After a study it became apparent that such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources. There has been considerable opinion to the effect that such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.

McCloy’s response remains controversial. There had been no study on bombing Auschwitz. Instead, the War Department had decided in January that army units would not be “employed for the purpose of rescuing victims of enemy oppression” unless a rescue opportunity arose in the course of routine military operations. In February an internal U.S. War Department memo stated, “We must constantly bear in mind, however, that the most effective relief which can be given victims of enemy persecution is to insure the speedy defeat of the Axis.” No documents have been found in the records of the leaders of Army Air Forces considering the possibility of bombing Auschwitz.

For three decades the failure to bomb Auschwitz was a minor side issue to the war and the Holocaust. In May 1978 American historian David Wyman wrote an article in the magazine Commentary titled “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed.” His article provoked much positive response and was reinforced by the startling photographs published by two leading Central Intelligence Agency photo interpreters, Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier. Developed with technology available in 1978, but not in 1944, these photographs seemingly gave a vivid demonstration of what U.S. intelligence could have known about Auschwitz-Birkenau, if only they had been interested. One photograph shows bombs dropping over the camp—because the pilot released the bombs early, it appeared that bombs targeted for the Farben plant were dropped on Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another pictures Jews on the way to the gas chambers. Wyman’s claims gained considerable attention, and the failure to bomb became synonymous with American indifference.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, debate over the issue intensified. Military historians challenged Holocaust historians in an ineffectual debate characterized as the “Dialogue of the Deaf.” In 1993 both Holocaust scholars and military historians of divergent points of view addressed the issue in a symposium at the National Air and Space Museum that marked the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. At issue was the nature of the aircraft that could have been used. Was bombing feasible, and when? From what air fields would the bombers take off, and where would they land? What airplanes would be used? What escorts would be required, and at what cost in men and material? Could lives have been saved and how many? At what cost to the Allies? But in addition to military considerations, political questions were at issue. Did the plight of the Jews matter? To whom and how deeply? Were Jews effective or ineffective in advancing the cause of their brethren abroad? Did they comprehend their plight? Were they compromised by their fears of anti-Semitism or by the fears they shared with American political leaders that the World War would be perceived as a Jewish war? Historians are uncomfortable with the counterfactual speculation “What if…” But such is the debate over bombing Auschwitz.

We know that, in the end, the pessimists won. They argued that nothing could be done, and nothing was done. The proposals of the optimists, those who argued that something could be done, were not even considered. Given what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the summer of 1944, many have seen the failure to bomb as a symbol of indifference. Inaction helped the Germans achieve their goals and left the victims with little power to defend themselves. The Allies did not even offer bombing as a gesture of protest.